Nescire aude.

April 26, 2010

"Saving God is a rich and provocative book. … I found Saving God to be original, complex and insightful. However one reacts to Johnston's naturalistic reinterpretation of Christianity and the other monotheisms, one may still applaud his rejection of idolatrous uses of religion to serve human ends."--Mark Johnston, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

I find this modesty admirable. (The NDPR review is actually by Lynne Rudder Baker.)

April 25, 2010

Where is the true avant-garde in cuisine today to be found? One's first inclination, I suspect, will be to point to Serrano's foams, Homaru Cantu's edible menus, and all those workers in kitchen laboratories grouped under the heading of molecular gastronomy. And after all anyone attempting to Cook Along with Achatz will find himself looking around for maltodextrin (and other ingredients more obscure, and more frequently associated with industrial processing) as often as visiting the butcher. And yet we know that those same people will find themselves rendering tallow, and even Marc Veyrat acknowledged that (this is now I think translated twice over) experimentation must go ever further, since only in that way can traditional methods be saved. And in a thousand other ways it is evident that however much the façade may have changed, it is still worked on using the tedious escoffolding of the same old haute cuisine, which can only ever result in what Mary Frances Kennedy referred to as "ordeals of tricky nothingness".

What boots it to keep pouring ever-older wine into gaudier and gaudier bottles? Art must die, and not that it might live long—must die and be buried. Thereby are we true to its inner principles? If so only per accidens; optimally we would discover this "truth to a principle" and root it out as well. But perhaps this cannot ever be done by someone who has it as his goal, at least in this realm; perhaps the self-nihilation that is a part of art means that deliberate nihilism can never be complete.

I don't intend to settle, or even further address, that question, since I do not think I am in a position to assess the intent and motives of my favorite candidate for leading light (if the world only knew!) of avant-garde cuisine, namely, as you will have guessed by now, Sandra Lee. She is not unlike the molecular gastronomist, but she goes further—far enough, in fact, that a difference in kind and not merely in quantity is effected. For both she and the molecular gastronomist are interested in the materials industry has made available to the chef (or, as we would better term the agent in the post-Lee world, the assembler), but the latter still regards the material as something which demands to be worked over yet again—by the gastronomist, that is. Thus he works with ingredients in a significantly cruder form than does Lee—foolishly. For haven't we got here simply a reprisal of the phenomenon on which Michael Pollan has harped at such length? A favored example of his concerns cake mixes, which in principle can be formulated so as to require practically nothing in the way of technique by the eventual enjoyer of the cake. The mere addition of water might suffice. But such mixes fared poorly, because they didn't feel enough like "cooking"—hence they were reworked to require the addition of a cracked and beaten egg, as well. A step back for technology, the expenditure of extra effort on a curlicue, unsolving a solved problem so that others might solve it themselves—in the name of feeling as if one was cooking! But this of course is precisely what we want to, what we must, overcome, this "cooking". It is clear that molecular gastronomy contains no "experimentation" at all, for all its lasers, flash-freezing, fancy powders, etc., but rather the assimilation and rendering safe of what would otherwise be new—an artificial aging of the new, a controlled decay which breaks down the tendons, ligaments, etc. so that the "tough cuts" with which industry provides us can be spooned up and gummed with ease by the most reactionary of food critics.

Can one imagine even the most (soi-disant, of course!) liberal-minded critic looking with hungry or at a minimum appreciative eyes on one of Ms. Lee's assemblages? I put it to you that the answer is "no". She denies not only technique and the false ideal of cooking, but any connection with pleasure or aisthesis. The perverse delight she takes in putting one literally inedible thing next to another in crafting a "tablescape" (the mere word makes even me shudder—I will not, I think, be glad to live in Lee's world, even if I cheer its coming!) testifies to her complete disinterest in making her purported food anything like palatable—but of course neither the plating thereof nor the decoration of her tables offers anything to delight the eyes. (It was because of its orientation toward mere pleasure that Plato classed cookery a mere "knack" and denied the cook any knowledge worth the name—only with Sandra Lee has the chef gained the ability to answer this 2,500-year-old insult.) In short, Lee asserts the complete autonomy of cuisine from everything else, not only the interests of its consumers (something one might think she shared with, say, the language poets) but even from the technique of the practitioner (in this respect she is far more deserving of being honored on ubuweb (say with a recipe collection) than many who do appear there). For she is, as noted, entirely reliant on industrial concerns to furnish her with her matériel. With a fish stick she is in her element; with a fish decidedly out of it.

I am not sure who Ms. Lee's audience is. I expect that they do not conform much to the stereotype of the artistic nihilist. No spiky-haired punks these, no decadent flâneurs. They are not, I expect, to be found in garrets or lofts. But they, and Lee herself, are carrying out a striking artistic revolution, perhaps the first real revolution in the history of cuisine, and with it perhaps for the first time is it possible to describe the chef/assembler's field of endeavor as a truly artistic one.

April 08, 2010

The obvious, but incorrect, method: [(x,y) | x <- [1..], y <- [1..]]. Incorrect, of course, because this stream will never get even as far as (2,1); after x gets the value 1, y must run through all the natural numbers before x gets the value 2. The lesson is that the value of y has to be constrained by the value of x, so that one actual solution is [(x-y,y+1) | x <- [1..], y <- [0..x-1]], which solves the problem in that there is no particular pair the stream will never generate even though, plainly, it will never generate all of the pairs.

I find I can't shake the feeling that if one knew extremely well the original ten sonnets that form the basis of Queneau's combinatoric trick (knew them as perhaps Queneau and his translators themselves did) one would thereby also know all hundred trillion sonnets generable from them, and not just in the sense that no given generated sonnet would be a surprising.

April 06, 2010

Leiter says, regarding Gardner's description of scientific and mathematical cranks, that "with a few suitable modifications, we can all think of some philosophers to whom [it] applies". Presumably he himself has a few in mind! It is no doubt eminently (and unusually?) politic of him not to mention anyone in particular, but for my part I wonder of whom he was thinking when he wrote that—since the only person I can think of, when we get to the criteria, at least, rather than the description, is Nietzsche. Well, for all that, perhaps Nietzsche was a crank. It needn't be solely a derogatory term.

(Nagel's review of O'Shaughnessy's last book says that he "is a remarkably gifted and solitary philosopher who pays almost no attention to anyone else … It has seven hundred closely printed pages of dense argument, with hardly any references to the vast literature on these topics", claims consistent at least with the first volume of The Will. But not a crank!)